Nora Ephron on the Shortcomings of Memory and the Glory of Egg Yolks

Nora Ephron's never been short on material: She turned her messy second divorce into the novel Heartburn, which she later adapted into the 1986 movie starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson; she spun the 1940 film The Shop Around the Corner and a newfangled thing called the Internet into You've Got Mail; and her last book of essays emerged from a very specific grievance about aging, titled, I Feel Bad About My Neck: And Other Thoughts on Being a Woman.

Her newest collection, I Remember Nothing: And Other Reflections, available now, is a slim, candid, and always witty package of Ephron's insights, written and bound before they slip her mind forever. Here's what you should know about Ephron—and don't you forget!—before picking it up.

· When you see her at a dinner party, always introduce yourself. "I have a secret signal with my husband that involves my pinching him very hard on the upper arm. The signal means, `Throw your name at this person because I have no idea whom I'm talking to.'"

· If you really cared about her, you'll tell her when she has something in her teeth. "It's very sad to look in the bathroom mirror at the end of an evening and realize you've spent the last ninety minutes with spinach on your tooth. Or parsley, which is an even more dangerous thing to eat. And that none of your friends loved you enough to tell you."

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The jacket of Nora Ephron's I Remember Nothing.

· She's more than a rom-com queen. In 2006, she told New York Magazine, "I've written other things, sad scripts that are on the shelf that are unbelievably serious, hard-hitting political things." In the book, Ephron revisits her beginnings in New York as a mail girl at Newsweek in the 1960s, and later as a reporter for TheNew York Post and columnist for Esquire. She now writes social and political commentary for The Huffington Post. Ephron is currently working on her forthcoming play Stories About McAlary, based on the life of late Pulitzer-winning New York journalist Mike McAlary.

· She's waging war on the "tasteless" egg-white omelet. She writes, "Let me explain this: You can eat all sorts of things that are high in dietary cholesterol (like lobster and avocado and eggs) and they have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on your cholesterol count. NONE. WHATSOEVER. DID YOU HEAR ME? I'm sorry to have to resort to capital letters, but what is wrong with you people?"

To read an excerpt of I Remember Nothing, from the December issue of ELLE, click here. To order the book, click here.